Pages

Tuesday, 4 July 2017

Manifestations from a Dream

I have been playing with air dry clay and have created something I dreamt about back in March.

First a little bit of back story to help understand the gravity of this piece.

I have been seeing a psychoanalysis since Nov 2016 to help me with my knee issue, which has been so beneficial in so many different ways.

Mid March I had this very profound and lingering dream which I brought up with my therapist, who walked me through some dream analysis.

One thing that was so strong about the dream was an item that seemingly represented something very significant to myself. I could recall the texture, weight and importance of this item. The item itself was an oddity as it was a chess piece. However this chess piece was actually that of two melted together, the knight and rook. The chess piece itself was analysed to it's inth degree with much of the information discussed resonating with me on so man different levels.

The image, weight and texture of the chess piece haunted me for weeks until I decided to see how I would go actually physically making it.

I started out by first working with some air drying clay tiles to work out the texture and finish of the piece. Nothing was working out right, but I kept going. After about 10 tiles I found a finish that sort of worked, but it still wasn't quite right. By this time I decided to start making the actually physical form of the chess piece.

This part of the process happened in an hour or so with very little effort required. I felt I was working by muscle memory which, if you think about, is VERY strange as I have never physically held this piece. I had to leave the raw chess piece for a couple days to dry. Then came the next process that had to be figured out on the fly. Brick work, which I carved out of the dried clay. While I was working on this texture of the final figure I realised I had NOT taken the brick texture in to account when playing with my tiles at the very start.

To see how this would likely work out I of course made another tiles and did a test. Luckily I was able to get a better crackle texture with a slightly different technique and I would not have worked this out if I had not have done this test.

The final step was actually painting the chess piece. This was the scariest part of all even though I had spent an entire day working out the perfect colour I wanted.

After applying the crackle medium and waiting for that to dry I added the darker blue was to get the colour finished I wanted.

The final step of the entire process was sealing the surface. I used Glossy Accents to get that seamless glaze quality I was after.

As I love macro photography I managed to gave some very awesome close up shots of the crackle. It came out perfect.

I hope you have enjoy reading how I made this piece. It was a joy to make.